My grandfather was one of thirteen children. I don’t remember most of his siblings, although I do remember visiting, on occasion, Aunt Erlene. My mother prepared my brother and me for those visits by reminding us Aunt Erlene had dementia. We understood this to mean Aunt Erlene refused to cook on her stove.
That’s obviously a very pieced-together kind of child’s memory. Still, it begs the question of memory itself. How is memory formed?
I was recently reading John Swinton’s Becoming Friends with Time, and the subtitle, “Disability, Timefullness, and Gentle Discipleship” provides a good sense of what the book is about. Swinton examines the ways we move through time, especially those of us who aren’t able-bodied. He asks: do our practices of faith accommodate those who move through the world in physically slower ways? For those who meet with the world with intellectual challenges?
Swinton recounts a video he watched of Naomi Feil, founder of “validation therapy,” as Feil worked with a woman suffering from dementia. The woman is deeply withdrawn and does not speak. But as Naomi speaks to her, strokes her face, and sings “Jesus Loves Me” and “He’s Got the Whole World,” the woman eventually opens her eyes, starts to keep beat with the music, and even begins singing along!
When the mind is no longer capable of memory, the body is. This woman had no cognitive access to these songs, but she had inscribed these melodies, these rhythms from early childhood somewhere deeper than her brain, and she had not forgotten them.
To think of our body memory, as Christians, is to think of our habits. There may come a day when we suffer from dementia or another physical crisis that causes loss of cognitive function. As we age, of course, we can expect to think more slowly, more unreliably. But gratefully, faith isn’t only a matter of the beliefs we hold in our head. Faith is something we do with our bodies. It’s a practice of the mouth, the knees, the hands, the feet:
“Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the LORD,” Psalm 134:2.
“For you have delivered my soul from death, yes, my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of life,” Psalm 56:13.
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer,” Psalm 19:14.
“For this reason I bow my knees to the Father,” Ephesians 3:14.
What habits of faith engage our bodies? Can we value these practices for what they inscribe deep within us, for the “memory” they form?
Jesus loves me, this I know.
Gratefully yours,
Jen